Individuals can work together to build physical structures, like houses, bridges, and factories. But they also build information structures. An information structure is a set of ideas, shared by a social group.
Institutions are are information structures that outlast the people who create them. They can be organizations or networks of organizations, like the court system, the press, markets, hospitals, or corporations. They can be actionable ideas, like the idea of marriage, a college degree, bitcoin, or the idea of “an eye for an eye.”
You can tell that ants and people are social beings, because they create institutions. An institution is a durable information structure that is sustained by the consensus behavior of individuals over time.
An institution lasts because of how it stores and exchanges information. Individuals contribute information to institutions, while at the same time, the institution contributes information to individuals. It tells them what to do and how to behave.
Over time, the institution takes up permanent residence in a social group. It accumulates traditions, rules, assigned roles, and ways of recruiting new members.
Since it’s an information structure, institutions are stored in the minds of their members, and in physical records. Individuals learn about the institution, how it works, what to expect from it, how to join it, and what happens if they don’t. They teach their children and their neighbors about it.
To extend personal memory, people record the institution’s history in physical records. Filing cabinets, databases, and statues with bronze plaques extend the memory of individuals.
As long as this information is retained, and there are people willing to act on it, the institution lives on. The physical form of the information does not matter, the institution’s preservation is purely a matter of preserving the information that it’s made of.
This information exchange leads to individual action: the institution by itself cannot act. An institution cannot cut down a tree, build a house, or arrest anyone. Only people (or the physical structures they build) can act. Institutions process information and make decisions, but ultimately those decisions only become actions when an individual receives those decisions and acts on them.
We talk about institutions in terms of our trust in them. This trust is itself an institution, a durable information structure that’s shared among individuals.
Broadly speaking, institutions fail us in one of two distinct ways:
Sometimes institutions have too much power (or the wrong kinds of power) over individuals, and can harm us.
Some institutions have too little power (or misdirect the powers they have). These institutions fail to protect us, or provide the services they were supposed to.
We are afraid of these. We do what we can to limit their power, or sometimes we must live in fear.
We are disappointed in these. We do what we can to support them, or sometimes we must live with our disappointment.
In the era of physical warfare, enemies attack our physical structures with guns and bombs. To weaken or destroy a social group, you basically needed to attack the physical things produced by that group.
In the era of information warfare, enemies attack our information structures with artificial trust. To weaken or destroy a social group, you basically need to attack their institutions.
How do we make institutions strong enough, but not too strong? We want them to be strong enough to protect us and provide us with services. We don’t want them to be too strong and push us around. Cybernetics is the art of navigating between two extremes: not too much, and not too little.